Your eye doesn’t always have to be behind the camera to get a good shot.
I rather like this tight portrait of my son, and I shot it from about hip level as we were standing up. I just aimed the camera at him, he looked over at the camera, and I gave the camera half a second to focus then fired. No flash, just the available light the 50mm prime lens could capture indoors.
"Really, Dad? Again with the camera?"
Note the narrow depth of field: the nearest part of his face is in focus but the edge of his right cheek is blurred. This lens gets down to a 1.8 f-stop, which is great for low light but can be hell on focusing from time to time. A good part of shooting from the hip is luck, as I was only able to partially reproduce a shot like this with my daughter despite several attempts.
That’s not to say it wasn’t worth a shot, especially with a digital camera where bad shots can be dumped on the fly.
No post processing on this. I really need to brush up on my post-proc workflow, but I just don’t have time. Some day…
About Mike Oliveri
Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. He is currently hard at work on the werewolf noir series The Pack for Evileye Books.
I love playing with the post-processing, especially when the changes I make are subtle, as most the changes I make tend to be. I’ve been playing a lot with Photoshop ever since starting the 365 Self Portraits and continuing into this year’s 365 Days of Color.
So…tell me why I’ll want a 50mm lens, in addition to the 18-105 and 70-300 that I intend to get.
A 50mm lens is a great portrait lens because the low aperture gives you great control over depth of field: you can blur the background or bring it into focus, depending on the result you desire. I primarily use it for indoor shooting without a flash, though. It sacrifices some zoom capability, but because it’s such a fast lens it works great in low light. When I take pictures at karate events, for example, I just set a custom white balance and start shooting. I don’t need to try to time shots perfectly with the flash or wait for the flash to recharge between shots.